This week we are on step 4 of the series How To Develop a Sound Facebook Fan Page Strategy, developing promotions. Even though every fan page may not need a promotion or series of promotions to be successful, I believe that most can benefit from conducting them.  Promotions are an opportunity to jumpstart fan engagement, give value back to fans, and grow the exposure of your page to the personal networks of your current fans.

(Also please note that for the sake of consistency in this series, I've chosen to refer to Facebook brand pages still as "fan pages" and "Likers" as "fans". You can expect us to blog about the implications of Facebook's F8 developments on Facebook fan pages.)

Looking to work in social media marketing and have your clients be some of the world's best brands? Know someone who would be perfect for it? Have you/do you work in a traditional agency (PR, advertising, etc.) and find your clients love you but you're ready for the next step?

This challenging role serves as a liaison between our clients and our internal teams, requiring a mix of intense organizational skills, deft people skills and the ability to manage to a timeline and budget. Please note that this position is not a sales jobs. That's not what we mean by "Account Manager." We're referring to relationship management and project management, combined with traffic skills, as they apply to our work style.

We're seeking an experienced Account Manager, with the following qualifications:

It has been a few months since my last post in the social media nonprofit series, so I am jumping back on the blogging bandwagon. I am excited to highlight the Ad Council and their social media techniques. This amazing nonprofit organization has been educating Americans through PSAs for over 65 years, and their tremendous efforts to raise awareness of public issues and encourage action have not gone unnoticed, especially in the social media world.

One of the things that drew me to the site in the first place was the fact that Ad Council is offering seminars to aid nonprofits in creating successful advertising campaigns. While the first few seminars started with more traditional advertising techniques, the more recent seminars cover my favorite topic, social media marketing. ! Some of the topics include: Blogging 101, Mobile Marketing, and measuring social media success for your nonprofit organization.     

YouTube

Of all the social media outlets Ad Council uses, I am most impressed with their YouTube channel. With over 3,000 subscribers and 160,000 channel views, the channel has generated over 200 comments, not to mention numerous comments on individual videos. Since the Ad Council focuses on communication and getting their messages heard, the YouTube channel is a great social media tool for them. They can upload all of their ads in one place; this way, supporters can easily share the PSAs on social networking sites or even embed them into their own websites/ blogs. The Ad Council also cross promotes these videos (and more) on their Facebook fan page under a “video” tab to make them easily accessible.

A woman in China wanted to buy a car. As is true in almost any marketplace, you get a better deal if you can buy in volume. So she listed her intention on a large Chinese social network and asked if anyone in the area wanted to go into a local dealership and buy the same car. Maybe, she reasoned, if we buy two we'll get a better price.

Two weeks later, 55 people walked into that dealership and bought 55 cars.

That, I think, is the real potential for group purchasing. And it's got potential to radically transform commerce in the United States.

Enterprise business intelligence analysts are getting a new toy to play with, this one addressing the rapidly evolving field of social media analytics. SAS, practically our neighbor just up the road in Cary, NC, launched their new Social Media Analytics solution this past week in Seattle - a launch which incidentally made some very smart uses of social media in its own right. As a follow up, SAS hosted a small event Wednesday night for agencies and social media practitioners in the Research Triangle area, and was nice enough to throw us an invite or two.

A quick thanks to David Thomas, the social media manager from SAS, for both those invites and for hosting a great event. You can find some photos of the gathering over on Wayne Sutton's blog. Beyond the networking, David managed to work in a very interesting demo of the new service. Here are two of my initial takeaways:

Last weekend I was browsing my Facebook account, when text on the right side of the screen caught my eye: "Frightened Rabbit coming to Cat's Cradle." Frightened Rabbit? Seriously? I freaking LOVE that band! I clicked, I was transferred to an the vendor's info page, and minutes later I printed out my ticket.

I saw, I clicked, I bought. A Facebook ad fairy tale. If only all impressions could end in such sweet success.

In reality, as with most online ads, millions of Facebook ad impressions end their digital lives as nothing more than a sight briefly seen on a sidebar. So what can you do to ensure that at least a decent number of your ads lead Facebook wanderers to the promised land?

Last week I talked about how important a content strategy is for your fan page.  This week I'm going to take that one step further by taking a look at your current tab structure, and how to best optimize and organize the tabs that exist on your Facebook fan page. In this stage of your Facebook strategy development you should already have your content strategy and value proposition together, and these two should also drive the rationale for what tabs are created and how fans are going to interact with them. 

Even though the Wall and Info tabs are mandatory, there are 4 visible tabs to utilize and, these should be utilized to provide additional value and areas of engagement.  Let's take a look at how to make sure that your Facebook fan page tabs don't end up being glorified microsites:

Woke up to a nice post today on the Cision Blog called "Revisiting the Top 100 Social Media & Internet Marketing Bloggers." According to new data, here are the top 10 social media and internet marketing blogs:

1. Mashable
2. Ignite Social Media <-- that's us!
3. Problogger
4. ReadWriteWeb
5. MediaShift
   
6. Danny Brown
7. aimClear Blog
8. Seth Godin's Blog
9. Social Media Today
10. Social Business

What was particularly gratifying about this list is that Cision used real data (from their tool and Compete) to rank these sites based on audience behaviors, including:

Last week I discussed the first step in developing a sound Facebook fan page strategy, developing a firm value proposition.  This week, I want to cover the next step: developing the content strategy. 

In a nutshell, the content strategy is the guide for the ongoing content posted to the page.  It doesn't need to be a full editorial calendar, nor should it turn into one.  Instead, this strategy is simply the overall guidance for the types of content your page will update on an ongoing basis to help accomplish the value proposition.  Just like brand guidelines, it will save your Facebook fan page from appearing like it has ADHD.

As a social media agency, we advise companies on how to conduct their presence within Facebook, particularly for fan pages.  In this exercise, we must figure out why a fan would want to become a fan in the first place, why they would stay a fan, and how we can get them to become more invested and engaged as a fan.

To do this, we take some time to set a Facebook fan page strategy.  After this is determined, we either implement the strategy (9 times out of 10), or this strategy is carried out by internal client teams.  Either way, we are held responsible for the success.  In this series,  I will review the following 5 steps to developing and implementing a successful fan page strategy:

• Step 1: Develop the Value Proposition
• Step 2: Develop the Content Strategy
• Step 3: Develop the Tab Structure
• Step 4: Develop Promotions
• Step 5: Implement, then Monitor and Respond

Let's start with the first, and most important, step.